2012 marks the centennial anniversary of the birth of British mathematician, Alan Turing, widely acknowledged today as the father of the computer. Internationally it has been dubbed Alan Turing Year, and Olympic torch bearers stopped before a commemorative statue of him on route to the London stadium in tribute to an, as yet, little recognized giant in the history of technological advancement. Winston Churchill opined that Turing’s decryption device helped to end WWII years earlier than might otherwise have been achieved. Turing’s life story, however, is a singularly harsh tragedy. A homosexual, in 1952 he was convicted of gross indecency with another man, and compelled to take female hormones as a therapeutic treatment for his “criminal” deviance, a procedure widely referred to as chemical castration. Just two years later he was found dead in his bed due to cyanide poisoning.

Alex Paul Young‘s theatrical piece, Pink Milk, is a highly personal, impressionistic work – a mash up of contemporary gay themes and biographical details from Turing’s life. Fueled by a righteous outrage and abandoned to a fantastical world of make believe, it dispenses with any sense of historical, cultural, or scientific accuracy, to present a free-form poetic narrative fused with dance and music. It’s an odd departure point from which to explore the life of a celebrated logician and mathematician, but that’s not all that’s odd about it. Young’s Turing, as a boy, develops a robotic playmate that runs on apples. In real life, the adult Turing was enraptured by Disney’s animated film, Snow White. Apples – plastic white ones and natural red ones – denote the stage boundaries, and actors regularly bite into one together as an indication of shared understanding. As a boy Alan is shown to be distracted by daisies growing on playing fields, and these engage him in life and death discussions. A glass of milk is another personified character, and the Pink Milk of the title is a somewhat strained symbol of tainted motherhood – both bloodied breast milk and TB-infected cow’s milk. Despite what grown-ups think or say, logic does not apply in young Alan’s world. Young’s unruly script, rendered in a somewhat textureless blank verse, gallops along on a dizzy note of abandoned self-indulgence. Its utter whimsicality can be hard to swallow.

What it does have going for it though is a relentless strangeness, a bold insistence on its own terms. The cheap sense of fatalism and overwrought lyricism are suddenly disrupted by a break out of music and synchronized ensemble dancing. The actors huddle in a group as a clubby electronica pop permeates, and a staccato, mechanical choreography takes hold. Apropos nothing, rigid arm thrusting and stiff-necked twisting are enjoyed, and it’s clubland 1982 again. At once bizarrely appropriate, and yet inappropriate, these instances have a distinctive flair and contribute a signature with its own peculiar gravitas. The troupe of seven young performers are utterly down when it comes to these movement passages and the sequences are as compelling as they are perplexing.

It really is too bad for the play’s Chicago-based company, White Elephant, that they found themselves booked in to perform here at the Gene Frankel Theatre. Originally devised for a surrounded stage forum, the presentation suffers in Frankel’s compressed space and traditional stage-facing-audience format. Gamefully Elephant string a line of audience seats along the back and side walls of the performance area, but this doesn’t fully suffice as an answer. Worse still, the Frankel’s regulations regarding noise levels means the music is played at an absurdly low pitch during dance segments, as if an elderly relative were trying to sleep next door. Energy levels are impacted accordingly.

A hard working cast let none of this really stand in their way. Everyone gives it 100 percent, with stand-out contributions by Casey Hartley as “The Authority Figures”, and Joe McManus who, as Turing, struggles to put some humanity into an abstracted, romanticized central character. Young is very lucky in his cast, and perhaps even more so in the directorial hand of Brandon Powers, who propels all along at a headlong tilt with unpredictable turns. Powers is additionally credited as joint choreographer and, as such, it can safely be said that he’s helped save Pink Milk‘s bacon. The original, catchy, and entirely on point music is by Visager. Anyone looking for a mature reflection on the life and contribution of Alan Turing is advised to look elsewhere. But if intriguing performance, gay themes, and fantastical whimsy are your bag, you’ve come to the right place. Drink your milk.

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Pink Milk
White Elephant
Writer: Alex Young
Director: Brandon Powers
Choreographer: Brandon Powers & ensemble
Movement, nosebleeds, electronica, and a talking daisy. Lonely gay genius Alan Turing builds robots to replace his lost love. PINK MILK, inspired by the father of Computer Science, explodes themes of creation, destruction and eternal love.
1h 40m   National   Chicago, Illinois
Drama   Dance
Staycation: In Someone Else’s Shoes   Ride the Rollercoaster of Love
www.pinkmilk2012.com
VENUE #09: The Gene Frankel Theatre
Fri 10 @ 9  Sun 12 @ 4:15  Wed 15 @ 2  Sat 18 @ 9  Sun 19 @ 2

Related Posts:

• Contrasts (Fringe Festival 2012)
• Dancing Into India – Being Becoming (Fringe Festival 2012)
• Snow White Zombie: Apocalypse – The End Is Nigh In Fairy Tale Land (Fringe Festival 2012)
• Punk Grandpa: 10 Things To Know About The Show Before You Go (2016 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL)
• For Body And Light (2014 Frigid New York Festival)

The spread of fairy tale themed and zombie-filled story lines have saturated the market over the last few years. We have The Walking Dead, Snow White and the Huntsman, Grimm, Once Upon a Time, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and now, Snow White Zombie: Apocalypse, premiering at the 2012 New York Fringe Festival.

If you haven’t seen it, go, and hurry as if the end is truly coming. Every moment of Brenton Lengel’s play proves worth it. Produced by State of Play Productions, this 90-minute show starts out with Little Red Riding Hood, who soon gets taken by the Big Bad Wolf, who turns her into a zombie. Cue Prince Charming, played by Adam La Faci, and his lady fair, Rapunzel, played by Parker Leventer. Both are there to kick some living dead ass. They do this well, though much credit goes fight choreographer Lisa Kopitsky and her assistant Adam Alexander.  Without these two the action scenes – and the characters in them – would have fallen flat.

Eventually, the team of fairy tale crusaders comes across a woman in the woods. “She’s dead, look at her skin, it’s as white as snow,” says a disgusted Rapunzel, after Charming kisses the corpse. But wait! Spoiler: it’s not a dead body; it’s Snow White, played by Lucia Brizzi, who now claims Charming as her own. The two women couldn’t be more different. Rapunzel is strong, bitter, and brave; and Snow White is weak, fluttery, and optimistic. The latter could have been annoying; instead, with great comedic timing the personalities balance perfectly.

Another plot line I enjoyed was Prince Charming; apparently, he actually is the same prince that gets all the fairy tale princesses. This isn’t his fault, he finds, when faced with Prince Dashing, played by David Marshall. Since Dashing is also a ladies’ man, Charming learns that wooing women is both their special power. Dashing uses his gift to steal Rapunzel and Snow White, Charming uses his to seduce a man-eating female bear, played by Simon Feil, who also did a stellar job as the Woodsman.

Each character touches on aspects of their actual fairy tale counterparts. Rapunzel talks about how she lost her hair and twins, Hansel and Gretel make an appearance, iron really does kill fairies, and Snow White is petrified of apples. They make references to just about every fair tale, even ones that aren’t in Grimm like The Princess Bride. No matter what their part, everyone in the cast had me completely entertained for over an hour. I also had no idea how it would end. Let’s just say it surprised me, but I won’t tell. So, go see it already, just make sure to wear your zombie-proof coat.

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Snow White Zombie: Apocalypse
State of Play
Writer: Brenton Lengel
Director: Jessica Creane
Snow White awakens to true love’s kiss 28 days after the zombie apocalypse. Now she must end the plague with Prince Charming — and his axe-wielding lover Rapunzel. Blood, sex, kung fu, gender politics…fairy tales as usual.
1h 40m   Local   Manhattan, New York
Drama   Comedy
Staycation: Fantasy Island Excursion   Sci-Fi Tech SuperHero Camp
www.stateofplaytheatre.com/shows/current-show-snow-white-zombie/
VENUE #01: The Living Theatre
Sat 11 @ 10  Wed 15 @ 2  Sun 19 @ 3:45  Fri 24 @ 5:30  Sat 25 @ 9

Related Posts:

• Bite The Apple – To Bite Or Not To Bite? (Fringe Festival 2012)
• #mormoninchief’s Boring Campaign (Fringe Festival 2012)
• Final Schedule Announced for Fringe Encore Series
• Pink Milk (Fringe Festival 2012)
• Pulp Shakespeare – The Bard Would Be Proud (Fringe Festival 2012)

Of all the things to be tempted with this holiday season, nothing is so tantalizing as Company XIV’s production of Snow White which lures audiences to 303 Bond Street with all the seduction of an evil queen extending a shiny, beautiful, apple in order to cast a magical spell.  One thing is certain – there is definitely something bewitching the spectators who walk in innocently and emerge 90 minutes later – filled to overflowing with images of exquisiteness and spectacle.  If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.

The lights are hung, // The wires strung, // The sets are all painted and built
The make-up’s applied // And I’ll say it outright: // The gold you will see is just gilt.
The kingdom and forest is plastic and steel // But the dancing feet are real.

And so begins the narrator’s speech as Jeff Takacs (who, as with all of the Company XIV productions, is responsible for the adaptation of the work, and has written the script) welcomes the audience to Snow White, conceived, choreographed and directed by Austin McCormick. It’s the perfect way to begin a fairytale: with the truth — that all the dazzling bells and whistles which make this show shine are remarkable, but take it all away and you’d still have the amazing dancers, executing the superb steps created by McCormick.  However, between the whirling and the witchery is where the wonder lives.

I have long since left all expectations at the door when it comes to Company XIV and Austin McCormick; the only thing I can be sure of is that the show will be dazzling, delightful and richly textured in a perfect blend of media and styles.  And so it is with Snow White – which immediately beguiles the audience with a Gothic-inspired funeral scene sung beautifully by Lauren Michelle.  What follows is not just dancing but aerial silk, aerial hoop, acrobatics, and mixed media.

What I’ve come to love about McCormick (as a director) is that if a work of his is labeled “family friendly” it does not mean he has diluted his vision for the young ones; if anything, he challenges the wide-eyed tots in a way that invites them to appreciate a world of pure imagination – a world that hides nothing and therefore allows for everything.  Rather than stripping away elements so that children can grasp the story more fully, McCormick actually layers in more complexity so that a younger sensibility is served alongside that of the adults. I envy the children who are growing up with Company XIV as an example of what theatre can be; they are being given memories that will spark them to create amazing things on their own, rather than walk in the footsteps of what they see being churned out by Hollywood in order to sell more happy meals.

This Snow White hasn’t been altered much from the original Brothers Grimm fairy tale – there’s the death of the queen, mourned throughout the land, who leaves behind her sweet little girl with skin as white as snow, hair as black as ebony, and lips as red as roses.  There’s the evil stepmother who is so vain that she can’t go a day without demanding that her magic mirror confirm that she’s the fairest in the land.  There’s the inevitable moment when Snow White (Gracie White) grows into her beauty and outshines the Evil Queen (Laura Careless) prompting the queen to hatch all sorts of plots which include death by hunter (hunter fails), death by suffocating corset (untied by a raven), death by poisoned hair comb (pulled out by a fox) and finally the worst of all – the poisoned apple which sends Snow White into a deep sleep.  Later she is awakened by the charmingest of Princes with a kiss, the two marry and the Evil Queen gets her comeuppance.

Gracie White as Snow White, Ashley Handel and Laura Careless as The Evil Queen

What McCormick has done is changed the focus of the piece; while the title may be “Snow White” the best moments are given to McCormick’s muse and principal dancer, the fantastic Laura Careless, who clearly sinks her teeth into the role of the Evil Queen as deeply as Snow White sinks her teeth into the poisoned apple.  Careless’ full range of talents are on display in this production, not only does she dance through each scene with an awe-inspiring  fervor but she clearly displays a wonderful gift of accents and even humor.  Having watched Ms. Careless over the last few productions I was delighted to see this side emerge – while she never fails to amaze it was wonderful to see her in a role that had so many opportunities to showcase the campier side of her (seemingly limitless) talents.

Of course, leave it to McCormick to have the audience thrilling to the darker side of such an innocent tale.

Gracie White as Snow White (photo by Steven Schreiber)

For her part Gracie White as Snow White is lovely; she has all the charm of an innocent young maiden who seems to never learn that an evil queen is out to get her.  The aerial work she does on the hoop is delicate and elegant and she often seems to defy gravity as she is hoisted and held and dropped before being caught at just the precise moment, all while smiling peacefully.

Of course, there is no one element of the piece that could exist without the other; McCormick has hit on a formula that works and employs a team that does extraordinary things with lighting effects (Gina Scherr), video projections (Corey Tatarczuk) and repeating musical themes.  So talented are they that set designer Zane Pihlstrom even make it snow — beautiful glittering bursts of sparkling snow that flutter and disappear … just like this production soon will.  So get your tickets now and give yourself the best holiday present of all.

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